


I'm Where We Said We'd Meet

by hippydeath



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Community: tfa_kink, M/M, X-Wing(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 06:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5901778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hippydeath/pseuds/hippydeath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey isn't sure what she's expecting to find when she finally reaches Luke Skywalker, but a scruffy Corellian with a horrific case of bed hair certainly isn't high on her list of expectations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a crack fill for tfa_kink, and then my brain ran away with it...
> 
> It's also worth noting I tend to read Wedge with Denis Lawson's Scots accent a la his stint in New Tricks. I know it's not canon, but um, yeah.
> 
> I'm pulling from Legends for background bits and pieces, fitting it in as I can.

They're caught in a moment, some kind of connection slowly starting to build between the two of them through the Force as they test each other, rudely broken by the appearance of a third figure emerging from the small dwelling.  
“Luke, ‘re you,” he starts to say, then clocks Rey and stares at her, then at himself; a chronic case of bed hair and a robe pulled roughly round his torso against the cold, which doesn’t hide the fact that he’s probably not… best not go any further with what he may or may not be wearing. “Aww Sithspawn Luke, you could have warned me before I got out the door like this.”  
Rey pulls the lightsaber back to herself, cradling it almost like a doll and ducks her head down, not looking at the newcomer. Luke blushes and does look over, and from the corner of her eye she sees fondness in his expression.  
“Sorry, I was just on my way back, I wasn’t expecting,” he lies, looking back at Rey, “I’m sorry, I didn’t even get your name.”  
“Rey.” She blurts out, and she and Luke go back to whatever bizarre staring that they were doing before.  
It lasts only a couple more minutes before the other man is grabbing Luke by the sleeve, “I’m guessing I wasn’t dreaming the Falcon flying over then?”  
It’s fate that has Chewie choose that moment to take off again.  
“More important places to be?” He asks with a sigh, pulling the robe a little tighter around himself. “Like perhaps somewhere warm?”  
Rey just nods. She doesn’t know who this man is, wasn’t told that there’d be someone else here, and while she knows Luke knew Han, was a friend and a brother, but she doesn’t know if she can say what needs to be said in front of a stranger.  
“Luke!” The other man admonishes, then just sighs. “You might as well come in, I’m Wedge.” He holds the door open for her, and finally introduces himself.  
Inside, it’s slightly larger than it looks from the outside, dark where the few windows are still curtained and, musty, is perhaps the polite way of describing the smell.  
Rey stands awkwardly, not sure where to sit or look.  
“Sorry about the mess, we don’t get a lot of visitors.” Wedge apologises, fiddling with a caf maker in the corner. “That’ll be done in a few minutes and Luke should be done with the Force by then.”  
Rey nods, welcoming the smell of caf, which she’s developed a taste for in the last few weeks. “I’m sorry,” she calls as he leaves her for what she assumes is a bedroom, “but who are you?”  
She doesn’t get a response, and so she lets her curiosity get the better of her, and after putting her staff by the door, she starts poking round the little living area that she’s in. She finds herself engrossed looking at small trinkets on a shelf, tinkering with the mechanism on one that seems to have failed.  
She’s thorough engrossed with it when she becomes aware that someone is watching her, and she turns around quickly.  
“Did you say something a few minutes ago?” Wedge asks, handing her a mug of caf.  
Luke hasn’t come back in yet and it’s making her nervous; how much can he find out from the Force, what is already going to know when he walks back in, she worries.  
“I asked who you were.”  
“Wedge Antilles,” he actually holds out his hand this time for her to shake, which she manages, clumsily with hands full of caf and trinkets and the lightsabre still tucked in the crook of her arm. “Luke’s husband, I suppose, although I’m not sure we ever signed anything official.”  
She doesn’t really know what to say to that, and he looks almost sheepish at the admission (is he not supposed to be here, she wonders, files it away to ask later). She’s still getting used to being around humans, not a myriad of alien customs, so she sticks to drinking her caf and watching him.  
He’d got dressed, sensible trousers with too many pockets, a bit like the ones Poe favoured, a rumpled shirt and thick socks, but no shoes, and she watches as he wanders around, picking up the detritus of an isolated life and opening the curtains, bringing light and making the whole place seem more appealing.  
“Han would’ve stopped, so who’s flying the Falcon?” he asks after a while of silence.  
“Chewbacca and me,” she says, suspecting that her face says more than her words. “Is he going to stay out there?” she asks, because she came to see Luke, not his unexpected, scruffy husband who no one warned her about, and she’s stuck here now until the Falcon comes back.  
He doesn’t say anything more about the Falcon, but there is a twitch of something in his face, she recognises it almost as loss, but then he’s carrying on the conversation with a shrug, “Force knows, I’m guessing you’re who’s had him so worked up the last few days?”  
“I,” she doesn’t know how to answer that, “Maybe? I don’t know.”  
Wedge nods his head, and she gets the feeling that maybe he puts up with a lot of weird stuff from Luke.  
Neither of them is prepared for Luke to then slam through the door, making a beeline for Rey, who only just has enough warning to get her mug out of the way before she’s enveloped in a crushing hug. It’s uncannily like when Leia embraced her as she was standing, cast adrift after the Starkiller, and she can’t help but flounder, still not used to so much physical contact.  
Caf mug still in her hand, she returns the embrace as best as she can, “I’m sorry,” she says, because she is, she can feel the hurt bleeding off him, but much like his sister, he quietly assures her that it’s not her fault.  
“Ah, Luke?” Wedge says.  
They pull apart and Luke takes a horrifyingly long, hard look at her, like maybe he’s finally seeing her, then nods and lets her go completely.  
“We have a lot to talk about.” he says, wandering off to the kitchen area. “Perhaps we should all get comfortable.”

Comfortable means Wedge gently taking Rey’s bag from her and sitting her down on their scruffy looking couch with more caf, while Luke puts together what she’s guessing is breakfast.  
They bustle around each other and she watches; it’s sort of the same way that the pilots and crew all seemed to know each other's spaces at D’Qar, familiarity from living in each other's pockets for so long, but there’s an extra layer here. Luke sheds several layers of Jedi robes until he’s just in trousers and a shirt, rolls his sleeves up and pulls out food from storage, handing things over without being asked, moving out of the way half a second before Wedge moves into that space. It’s odd, disorientating, but there’s something soothing about the place, and somewhere along the line she finds herself falling into a light doze.

“Start from the beginning,” Luke tells her, as she sits up and takes the plate of food that he’s offering before he sits down opposite her.  
Wedge ambles over with his own plate and sits next to Luke, elbowing him until he stops taking up all of the couch, “Let her eat first.” he admonishes.  
“No, no,” Rey assures him, wanting to give something in return for the food and the caf and the shelter. “I’ve got a holo from General Organa,” she says, “but you have to train me.” The desperation in her voice is a little embarrassing, Luke looks away and Wedge tilts his head to one side, watching her.  
“Maybe the beginning is the best place to start.” He agrees after a couple of minutes of contemplation and chewing.  
Rey hasn’t really touched her food, just pushing it around the plate. She starts and stops before she’s even managed to actually get a word out several times, until Luke interrupts.  
“Who was flying the Falcon?”  
“Chewbacca.” She answers without actually thinking about it.  
He nods. “Where’s Han?”  
She stalls again, takes a deep breath. “Kylo Ren killed him on the Starkiller base before we managed to destroy it.”  
Wedge looks like someone has punched him in the gut, face falling and fork clattering to his plate. Luke takes his hand with his mechanical hand, gripping it almost too tight, and looks almost as shocked as Wedge.  
“Where’s Leia?” Wedge asks quietly.  
“D’Qar, with the resistance.” She replies.  
Luke’s face cracks ever so slightly, and Wedge winces the way his hand is being held. None of them say anything for a while though, and Rey fidgets, feeling a little guilty about eating some of her (admittedly burnt) breakfast.  
“You’re here, so you found the map.” Luke says after a while. “How?”  
It finally all comes out in a jumble really; she doesn’t know the full story, doesn’t know exactly what happened to Poe, or what happened while she was on the Starkiller, but she tries to fill them in from what she’s been told, and tells them about Jakku, about Takodana, about Finn, about their lightsaber duel on a disintegrating planet.  
Wedge’s face shows his horror, Luke is more closed off, but she can feel his upset, his worry.  
“So you have to come back,” she finishes, “you have to train me because we can’t do this without you.”  
“Does the First Order know where you are?” Wedge asks, looking at her like she might have destroyed his life.  
“No, I don’t think so. Ren couldn’t get it from me and they never got BB-8.” She tries to sound convinced, but she’s really not, she’s just hoping.  
Wedge looks at her, then at Luke, and disentangles his hand. “I need a walk.”  
He gets up, jams his feet in his boots, grabs a jumper from the back of a chair and almost slams out the door.  
“Sorry.” She says.  
Luke just shakes his head. “I don’t know that I can teach you, but I suspect it falls to me as the last.” He sounds bone weary, and he’s slower as he stands up. “There’s a second room here, you can stay for a while, but I’m not sure I can ever go back. Not after what happened.”  
She wants to push, but she has the manners not to. She just opens her pack and pulls out the holo from Leia for him, and hands it and the lightsabre over without a word.  
He leaves her after that, and she’s alone in their house, which is odd. She can hear the holo playing though, and she can just hear enough that she knows she doesn’t want to hear it, so she leaves her bag where it is and goes outside, sits on a rock and watches the birds, drinks in the green, the cold biting wind and the ocean, and wonders how this became her life.

Dinner is a slightly less forced affair.  
Luke had found her after an hour or so, shown her where to store her things, where the ‘fresher was and given her a quick tour of that part of the island. He didn’t say anything about the Force or training, but there were tear stains down his face and he held himself rigidly, as though any other way would let him fall apart, so she didn’t push.  
Wedge re-appeared late in the afternoon, windswept and cold, knuckles bloody as though he’d been punching something, but he patched them up himself and set about getting the fire going and making some kind of dinner.  
There’s fish and vegetables, and it’s only a little burnt, for which Wedge apologises, and Luke laughs as though it’s some kind of in joke between the two of them. It’s stilted though and grates at her ears.  
“What do you want me to do?” she asks when they’ve finished eating. She has too much energy, wants to feel useful and they’re not giving her a lot of opportunity.  
“Dishes?” Wedge says hopefully, piling the plates up. “Sink, cleaner is the green bottle, rinse them and stack them.”  
She nods and gets on with it, still slightly weirded out by running water over her hands, and the sweet damp scents that come with so much moisture rather than the dry ones that she’s been used to all her life.  
“Why did no one tell me you were here?” She asks Wedge as he’s drying the plates up.  
Luke answers, “Chances are they didn’t know. He found me a few years ago and won’t leave.”  
All three of them laugh, and Wedge flicks at Luke with the towel. “You need someone to stop you crawling too far into your own head.”  
“It’s true.” Luke admits.  
They return to silence for a while, Wedge finishes drying up and goes off to read something, Luke vanishes for a while, and Rey stands just outside the door, marvelling at the different stars.  
“He does that a lot.” Wedge tells her, not sneaking up on her, but managing to just about catch her unawares. “I guess it’s a desert thing, one of my pilots used to do it as well, every new planet we visited.”  
“Have I wasted my trip?” she asks, still staring up at the sky.  
“No,” Wedge assures her, “he’ll teach you. He can’t not, I think. But Han was a brother to him, and a good friend of mine. We both need some time.” He claps her on the shoulder. “Give him a few days and he’ll have you running up and down those stairs three times a day and balancing him on your shoulders.”  
She gapes at him and he laughs, the sound finally bringing some warmth to this place.  
“I should turn in.” She says with a smile, and Wedge stands aside to let her pass. “Night.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke finally agrees to train her, and Rey starts to see what she's interrupted here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the massive delay between chapters. Life has an inconvenient habit of happening, and then I got brain wormed by the bakery AU that no one wants or needs, which I might be turning into some kind of 10,000 word epic.

It takes a week before Luke will even talk to her about the Force. In that time, they talk about Han, they talk about the last few weeks, about Jakku and what she remembers of the First Order. Wedge tells her about the squadron he used to command, the buildings he designed for Luke’s original training school and fills in small parts of their relationship, which, from what she can tell, has spanned thirty years, Wedge’s divorce and an awful lot of years not knowing what the other was doing.  
It turns out that Luke rises before dawn every morning to go and walk the island, and that Wedge will be up an hour or so later, turning on the caf and making breakfast. Most mornings she joins him, stops him burning bread or scrambling eggs beyond recognition. She can’t work out if his inability to cook is genuine or affected to make Luke do most of the work, and she doesn’t want to ask this early in their acquaintance.

“How did you find him?” She asks one morning while they’re sipping caf in peaceful quiet, and Luke is somewhere outside.  
Wedge shakes his head. “Luck I think. After I retired I picked a direction and started flying. I ended up here.” He sips his caf, “He told me to leave, to forget he was here, and I did for a while, but once I knew where he was, I couldn’t just abandon him. So I came back.”  
“Luck?” She sounds incredulous. “Not the Force?”  
“Force sensitive as a brick.” Wedge boasts with a grin. “I can’t explain it, but it happened, and I’m glad of it.”  
“Do you ever think about going back?”  
He shakes his head. “No, I retired when I did because they weren’t going to let me fly for much longer,” he holds out his right hand and she sees the tremors as he tries to hold it still, “old injury left me with nerve damage, and I couldn’t face a desk job, not in the military anyway.”  
She smiles and nods and drinks her caf, picking at her toast, “I meant more, you have family? Don’t you miss them?”  
“Ahh,” he understands, “I suppose. We have a mostly working holonet connection, so I keep in touch with people, but I don’t have much in the way of family.” He drains his mug and gets up to refill it. “My parents died when I was young, my sister vanished off with the remnants of the Empire when they fled with their tails between their legs, and I don’t really talk to Iella anymore, which was most of the problem in the first place.” He smiles ruefully. “I miss my friends, but I have Luke, and as ridiculous as that sounds, that’s what matters.” Sitting back down, he leans over the table to pick up a datapad. “One day, I always figured we’d head back, but, maybe not. And I don’t know if I mind.”  
She chews her toast and he reads his datapad for a while, making notes and drinking caf.  
“What about you?” he asks eventually, and she’s confused.  
“I don’t know.” She looks down at her mug. “I spent so long on Jakku waiting for my family to come back for me, part of me still thinks that maybe I’ve missed them, being away so long, but I suppose they really are gone.” She gets an odd flicker of confusion or skepticism from him then, but nothing she can really hold onto so she lets it go. “I have to go back though, I promised Finn, and Poe, once I’d learned to use the Force, I’d be back.”  
Wedge smiles, “What’re they like?”  
Rey waves her hands around. “Finn’s, scared. He’s brilliant and brave, but he’s scared as well. He doesn’t know anything,” she laughs a little at that, at the thought of how clueless he had been, but how quickly he’d caught on to things, “but he’s really smart, and I think he can use the Force as well, but he got cut up really badly by Ren so they wouldn’t let him come with me. He’s going to be amazing, I know, because he cares.” She finishes the caf in her mug, wrapping her hands around the still warm ceramic. “Poe’s an X-wing pilot, the best in the Resistance,” Wedge laughs at that, but she carries on, “and he’s kind and quick, he’ll be there for Finn while I’m gone. I don’t know him that well really, Finn spent more time with him, rescued him from the First Order.” She leans back on the couch wondering what else she can say about people who she doesn’t really know.  
“I think I knew his parents,” Wedge tells her, “Shara was death in the air, an A-wing pilot, so she had her failings, but if she’d been willing to fly an X-wing I would have had her in my squadron without a second thought if she hadn’t decided to retire.”  
The door opens then, interrupting anything else that Wedge looked like he might have been about to say, and letting in a blast of cold air along with Luke, who shrugs out of his outer robes and makes a beeline for the caf pot.  
“You can join me tomorrow morning, if you’re serious about this.” He says vaguely in Rey’s direction as he pours a mug for himself.  
She looks at him, then over at Wedge and breaks out in a massive grin. “Thank you!” she says, laughter bubbling out as she finally gets what she’s been waiting for.

Getting up before the dawn isn’t really a problem for her. Sleeping lightly and getting up early has been a part of her life for so long that it’s easy to get back into the habit after the month or so that she’s spent at relative ease. It’s raining, which isn’t unusual, a fine mist filling the air and coating everything as they leave the house, she can feel the sluggish warmth of Wedge, still asleep in his and Luke’s bed, and she sort of envies him as she steps out into the damp.  
Luke probably takes pity on her that morning. They head down those steps and across the island, climbing to maybe half the height of the house and there they stop, atop a cliff looking out over the sea.  
“What do you want from this?” Luke asks after long drawn out moments of silence.  
She’d been watching a seabird rising and falling on the sea’s surface as the waves pushed it around, and she wasn’t ready for the question. “To learn to use, this.” She flounders. “Ren said I needed a teacher, and he was right.”  
“Then why not let him teach you?” He asks.  
“Because he’s evil.” She replies without thinking. “He killed Han. He tortured me. He’s killed thousands for the First Order.”  
“What makes you think I’m any different?”  
She looks at him when he says that, shock writ clear on her face. “You’re, you. You’re a hero of the New Republic, the one who restored the Jedi Order. You killed Vader and the Emperor and helped restore democracy to the galaxy.” She pauses. “He’s, he’s a monster.”  
“I killed hundreds of thousands when I destroyed the first Death Star, more during the rest of the war. I couldn’t save my father.” He holds up his hand when it looks like she’s about to try and convince him that those aren’t bad things. “I couldn’t protect my own nephew and I led to the death of an entire generation of Jedi children. I’m as much of a monster as he is.”  
“You made a mistake. That doesn’t make you a monster.” She tries to convince him.  
“Maybe not, but I can’t look into my sister’s eyes. I can’t apologise to Han for my failure. I can’t face the parents of those children that Ren slaughtered. I’m responsible for what he become, what’s to say it won’t happen again if I teach you?” He asks.  
“I’m…” she starts.  
“Better than that?” He interrupts her. “Anakin thought that, before he turned to the Dark Side. Arrogance like that is the first step down that path. So again, what guarantee is there that it won’t happen again?”  
She stops and thinks this time, looks at his face and sees how he’s aged so much in this conversation, how it seems to have drained him. “There isn’t one. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.” She reaches out, rests her hand carefully on his arm. “If you don’t try, if you don’t give the Resistance some kind of chance against Ren, then you really will have failed. You really will be a monster.” They’re not the kind words she meant to say, but she’s fed up of this back and forth. She needs a teacher, the Resistance needs the Jedi, they have to do something before everything founders.  
He nods. “Alright.” He sounds so tired.  
Through the drizzle, the sun is starting to rise properly, the sky really starting to lighten on the horizon. It feels almost like the inverse of that moment on Starkiller as the light finally died. That was a death of hope, of chances, but now she feels like there could be hope again, that there are second chances opening out ahead, not just for her, but for the galaxy.  
“Sit down.” He tells her. “Get comfortable.”  
She does, grimacing at the dampness of the ground.  
“Close your eyes and focus on my voice,” he starts, and from then on she loses herself in the easy cadence of his voice. He takes her through a series of breathing exercises and she forgets that she’s sat on the damp ground of a world that never seems to stop raining. It’s strangely easy to find that calm centre in her head, to block everything out and feel the ebb and flow of life around the island.  
When she finally wakes from meditation, at least an hour has passed and she’s soaked through. Luke is sat next to her, watching and when he realises that she’s awake again, he nods, a small pleased smile on his face.  
“Back to the house.” He says, standing up and offering out his hand to her. “And dry clothes. No sense in you getting ill.”  
She feels ridiculously light on her feet on the way back to the house, like she could outrun a blaster bolt if she was given the chance, and everything seems brighter, sharper.  
“The Force,” Luke reminds her. “You open yourself to it and it changes the way that you see things.” He smiles. “Don’t get too cocky.”  
She laughs and races him two flights of the stairs, not even bitter when he wins.

Wedge is up and there’s caf in the pot when they get inside, but Luke shoos her off to change before she gets any. She’s glad of the dry clothes when she peels her damp layers off, shivering in the cold of her room.  
As she’s towelling off her hair and retying it (she needs to cut it again, she thinks idly, wondering if Luke has scissors somewhere) she thinks she can smell something burning. That’s not anything new. Wedge seems to burn everything he tries to cook, but this is a bit more burny than he usually manages. She hurries out into the main living space to find that yes, there is smoke heavy in the air, and that Luke and Wedge don’t seem to have noticed on account of the way that they’re pressed against each other, kissing. She’d known, well, assumed, they were lovers, obviously, but she’s never actually seen them do more than a quick peck on the cheek or a touch of a hand that lasts just a fraction longer than it would normally.  
But now, Luke’s pressed up against the counter, one of Wedge’s hands on his hip, the other, she thinks, in his hair, and Luke’s hands are slung loose round Wedge’s waist, they seem completely oblivious to anything going on around them and Rey feels genuinely embarrassed to be seeing something that intimate. She’d quite like her current home to not burn down though, so she coughs, thinking that’s probably what Poe would do in this situation (that or make obscene noises like she’d seen him do one evening on D’Qar).  
They don’t spring apart like Jess and Horn had, but Luke looks fairly mortified when Wedge does pull away, and Wedge goes bright red and starts swearing and trying to stop the smoke that’s pouring from the pan.  
She can’t help but laugh, and the flush on Luke’s cheeks drops the years that he’d seemed to age away and he looks happy for the first time since she’s been here. She feels a pang of guilt at that, she’s bought this stress to them.  
He turns away from her and folds himself round Wedge’s back and she feels the way the Force flows around him, damping down the smoke in the pan. They stop like that and Rey wonders if she should retreat back to her room, or perhaps out, give them some space, but Wedge steps away, holding the pan and looking put out at it.  
“No eggs, sorry,” he says, quirking a smile at her.  
She just shrugs, “No problem.” She fidgets in the doorway. “Can I get some caf, and I’ll give you two some privacy.” She sort of edges towards the caf pot and finds a mug, while they seem to have some kind of silent conversation, still pressed close, Wedge still blushing (he’ll say later it was the embarrassment of burning yet more breakfast, but they’ll both know he’s lying) and not actually giving her an answer.  
In the end, she doesn’t give them a choice, she just takes the caf and flees to her room. She has a stack of holo-dramas and novels to work through, a gift from Poe and Leia, and she jams earphones in and lets them get on with whatever it is that they want to do. It mostly works, apart from the occasional flash she gets through the Force which make her blush horribly and leaves a tight feeling in her chest that makes her think of Finn.

Eventually there’s a knock on her door, Wedge poking his head around it when she says that he can come in.  
He looks a little rumpled, and wearing a different jumper to the one he’d had on earlier, “Sorry about that.” He says.  
“It’s fine.” She pulls out the disk that she’d been watching and stands up, stretching. “I’ve thrown everything here out of balance, I should be apologising.”  
“Aye, well,” he scrubs a hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t be so mortified, I’ve been walked in on plenty of times, and walked in on plenty,” he laughs. “Luke’s making lunch, so nothing burnt, and then he said something about training after.”  
Her face falls a little, she can hear the rain outside, heavier now than it was earlier.  
“You asked for this,” Wedge reminds her.  
“I know,” she says quickly. “It’s not the training, it’s barely been a day, it’s the weather.”  
“You get used to it.” He holds the door open for her, and they go back to the main living area that smells very slightly still of smoke and burnt eggs. It also smells of roasting vegetables, and bread, something sizzling in a pan.  
“I want to see how good you are with that staff,” Luke says without turning from the pan.  
Wedge pats her on the shoulder. “I’ll make sure there’s hot water for when you’re done.” He promises, which doesn’t make her feel a sense of foreboding at all.

“You’re good.” Luke tells her after he’s handed her back her staff and they’ve beaten each other black and blue for a couple of hours. He’d won enough of their rounds, but she’s given a good showing, and he’s going to have an interesting collection of bruises.  
She hurts though, but she takes the staff and just shrugs. “I had to survive on Jakku.” She tells him, matter of fact, and doesn’t miss the slight wince that crosses his face.  
“Have you ever used anything other than a staff?”  
“Only the lightsaber, when I had to fight Ren.” She admits, leaning over to stretch out her back.  
“You’re going to need practice then, tomorrow we’ll start with practice blades.” He tells her, and heads back towards the house.  
She sighs and reminds herself that she asked for this before following him back in.

True to his word, Wedge had made sure that there was plenty of hot water, and she sank gladly into it, the heat chasing the chill and aches from her bones. She closes her eyes and lets her mind wander, thinking about Finn and Poe, about the people she knew back on Jakku (she wonders what happened to her speeder, her plants, whether a sandstorm has finally covered the entrance to her old home). She doesn’t miss Jakku itself, but she wonders what might have been if all of this hadn’t happened.  
A bang from the main living area brings her back to the present, back to Luke and his impressive show of skill this afternoon, to Wedge who seems so ridiculously relaxed about everything that is happening, to the fact that she’s not sure what she’s actually agreed to do now, what the future holds for her. There’s no shouting, so she lets her mind wander again, trying to hear what is happening in the main room, but only getting small fragments, things that make her wonder.  
“... talk to her?” Wedge is asking Luke something, sounding serious, and she can almost picture the way Luke turns away (he’s done a lot of that in the last week, turning from her questions).  
“What can I say to her… consolation…?” She suspects they’re talking about Leia, Wedge maybe asking why Luke won’t talk to his sister. Luke says more, but all she can here is his low rumble.  
“She looks like…”  
“... exactly celibate.”  
“No, that was only you.” Wedge laughs. She’s not sure who they’re talking about, although the tone has shifted slightly from the tension of mentioning Leia.  
She’s starting to wrinkle and the water is starting to go cold, so begrudgingly she gets out and dries herself off and dresses. She’s got some nasty bruises, and if Luke keeps his promise and starts her with a training saber tomorrow, she suspects she’s going to have more; he’d been using one against her staff and he was wickedly fast with it.

When she steps out, Wedge is stirring something on the hob, which by some miracle isn’t burning or smoking, and actually smells pretty good. Luke is cross legged on the couch, tinkering with his hand, which is disconcerting.  
She fairly pointedly turns away from Luke and his hand, and pokes around the kitchen. “That’s Luke’s cooking?” she asks with a slightly cheeky smile, and Wedge pulls a mock offended face.  
“I can cook.” He insists.  
“Stew.” Luke adds. “You can cook stew. And that’s only because Mirax refused to let you starve to death.”  
Wedge laughs at that, “It’s true.”  
At a loss for what to do, Rey picks up the mechanical ornament that she’d been fiddling with on that first day she arrived here, and takes it to where Luke is sitting.  
“Can I?” she asks, reaching for a screwdriver, still trying not to look at what he’s doing.  
“Hmm, it’s Wedge’s.” Luke answers, apparently talking about the ornament rather than the tools. He’s got one of his fingers hyperextended, and she wonders if she hit him too hard earlier.  
She just shrugs, asking, “Do you mind?” as she’s already started to pry a couple of the small parts away to get to the broken spring, already most of the way to twisting it back into place.  
Wedge walks over with bowls of stew just as she gets it to catch, and there’s a quick flash of light and a tinny shout of “YUB YUB COMMANDER!” from the device.  
She drops it, surprised and the noise, Wedge swears and just manages to keep hold of the bowls while Luke looks up suddenly and somehow stops it shattering on the floor with the Force.  
Floating in midair, it projects a small holo of three men and a woman, all in dark flight suits. The tallest man is holding a stuffed Ewok toy and waving one of the arms and whoever is recording it “Happy retirement from the Hawk-Bats!”. The recording finishes and starts up again with the same shout.  
“Sithspit Luke, make it stop.” Wedge complains, putting the bowls down on the table in between the tools that are scattered around. “And stop fiddling with things.” Bowls down, he takes the device and hits a switch on the bottom, then very carefully takes a pair of cutters and removes the spring.  
“Sorry.” Rey mutters, pulling her stew over to her. She’s trying not to laugh, as is Luke, and even Wedge has a slightly odd smile on his face. “Who were they?”  
“Some reprobates I used to fly with.” Wedge replies, “Wes Janson, Kell and Tyria Sarkin, and Garik Loran.” He waits to see if the names are familiar, but she’s just watching him, attention full on him, “And Lieutenant Kettch.” he adds for good measure.  
“Kettch?” She asks.  
“The Ewok.” Wedge confirms.  
She looks at him as though he’s gone absolutely mad, and after a minute or so, his serious face breaks and he cracks up.  
“We were running an undercover op, and someone, probably Janson thought it would be a good idea.”  
Luke is trying hard not to laugh off to one side, and though she is eating, she’s going slowly, because she wants the story out of Wedge more than she’s really interested in the food (although it is good).  
Eventually, she manages to get the story of the Hawk-Bats and the brave Lieutenant Kettch out of him, and dinner takes considerably longer to eat than it usually does. By the time the bowls are cleared, Wedge is sat with his arm round Luke’s shoulders, and all three of them are breathless with laughter.  
“Are all pilots like that?” she asks, suddenly worried about what she’s going to go back to.  
“Yes.” The both answer at once, and start laughing again.  
“Don’t worry,” Wedge assures her. “You get used to it.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Training is painful, and living with a married couple continues to be hellishly embarrassing. Wedge is rapidly running out of patience.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, life happened. Apparently I'm buying a house (this was not in the plan for this year). This chapter is shorter than I planned because I'm having some plot issues (namely I have no idea what I'm doing) and time issues (I have none; 9-5 job, I run a LARP system and the aforementioned house purchasing). It's getting there. I think two more chapters. Possibly three. Next chapter might raise the rating, or I might just go and write more of "Nothing Real in this Life".

“If you have a holonet connection, why hasn’t he been in touch with Leia?” Rey asks one morning when she’s decided that she’s not going to go and sit on a freezing cold rock with Luke, and is instead huddled in the warmth drinking caf with Wedge. She feels rotten and achey, and Luke didn’t argue when she told him no, which pleased her immensely.  
Wedge pulls a face, the kind that she’s learnt means he doesn’t really want to answer the question. Luke calls it his dealing with superior officers face, which usually gets him a glare, but Rey can kind of see what he means.  
“Luke’s not good at dealing with emotional people.” He eventually admits, “and I don’t think he’s ever worked out that Leia doesn’t blame him for what happened to Ben, at least no more than she blames herself.” He drinks his caf and thinks for a while. “He’ll talk to her eventually. But it’s best not to push him.”  
“Does she know you’re with him?” She asks, because it’s been bugging her for a while.  
“No,” Wedge shakes his head, “most people think I’ve settled in one of the Corellian exile colonies. I keep in touch with her occasionally.” Draining his mug, he goes and refills it, taking hers at the same time. “It wouldn’t surprise me if she did know, but she’s never said anything, never asked.”  
“Did Han know?”  
“No. We weren’t close.” It’s too terse an answer to be the truth, and she remembers the look of sorrow on his face when she broke the news when she first arrived.  
They lapse back into silence, and Wedge picks up a datapad that’s on the table, and starts working on it. She’s not sure entirely what it is that he does, but she thinks that she’s probably run out of questions she should ask for the day, and curls round her mug, staring out the window.

“Bring your guard up.” Luke tells her, moving back into a starting position and she sighs, raising the weapon crossways across her chest. She still aches, but it’s getting better. And at least the sun is out today, rather than more rain.  
He swings at her in the first of a series of strikes that she’s memorised, and she blocks, parries and swings against him as expected. She pushes out with the Force and tugs at his back foot, sending him off balance and is pleased when she lands a solid strike against his right arm. It’s short lived though, as he pushes forwards without much of a pause, and shoves against her with the Force with strength that she is only just managing to counter. They go at it like that for another repeat of the forms until he cracks her across the bottom of her ribs and she yelps in pain.  
“Luke, enough.” Wedge calls from where he’s been watching them, perched on a ledge. “She’s not going to learn if you break her.”  
“I’m fine.” She tries to insist, but straightening up makes a liar of her as she has to stop the movement quickly.  
It’s Wedge who goes to her first, Luke carefully putting down the training sword and picking up the flask of water.

They limp back to the cottage half an hour or so later, Rey leaning on Wedge, Luke trailing behind as though he’d done something galaxy shatteringly awful. She’s tried to convince him that it’s just some bruising, that she’ll be fine, but apparently he doesn’t deal well with actually hurting his students.  
She can’t help but wonder, possibly a little bitterly, if this was one of his failings all those years before.  
She slumps on their couch and Luke finds a medkit, Wedge already off running a steaming hot bath and making some kind of tea. Luke’s hands on her are cold when he pushes her top up to reveal a massive stretch of red and blue across the bottom of her ribs.  
“That looks…” she starts to say, although she’s not really sure what to say about it. She’s had worse, but she didn’t think that this time round it was that bad. “Doesn’t feel broken, at least.” She tries to assure Luke.  
He presses on her skin, gets her to inhale and exhale, twist one way and then the other while he keeps a hand in contact with her side, and eventually nods.  
“I don’t think anything is.” He agrees. “I’m sorry.”  
She just shrugs. “It happens. I can’t learn if I don’t screw up occasionally.” She pulls her top back down and carefully stands up, “That bath sounds like a good idea though.”   
“No more training for a couple of days.” Luke tells her as they walk towards the bathroom. “We’ll work on your focus and connection to the Force.”  
She doesn’t speak the lack of enthusiasm she feels; sitting still and staring at the waves isn’t her idea of a good time, but that’s why she needs to do it. She understands, she just doesn’t like it. She wants to be doing, to be learning to move things, to be learning to build her own lightsaber, to be getting ready to go back to help the resistance. She thanks Wedge and shuts the bathroom door as he leaves, carefully stripping out of her damp clothes and dumping them in a pile. She should be ready, she should be doing something more than training on an island at the back end of the galaxy.  
Patience, Luke’s voice nudges at her mind as she sinks into the water. They’re both still odd sensations; Luke in her head and being surrounded by water, but she’s getting used to them. 

She heals. It’s slow and tedious, as it always is, but the bruises fade and she spends less time catching herself as she moves. In the meantime, Luke puts her through her paces mentally, and she finishes each day just as exhausted as with the physical training.  
The mornings get earlier; the two of them leaving before the sun is cresting the horizon, and Luke takes her up to that top cliff again each day and she learns to move stones, to halt waves mid crash and to pluck the thoughts from his mind.  
It’s exhausting, she finds the mental work taking more from her than any physical exertion might. She’s doing well though, Luke assures her, and she takes warm pride in that, letting it carry her through as she fights to master so much in so short a space of time.

Getting the thoughts from Luke’s mind is hard. Once she’d learned to do it without him trying to stop her, he upped the ante and started to shield himself from her and really make her work for it. It’s hard, but when she finally manages she’s not expecting to find “why is he ignoring me?” at the front of his mind, rather than the agreed sequence of numbers.  
She pulls back from him, and looks him in the eye. “Luke?”  
He focuses his eyes and looks at her, “Nothing,” he insists, enough that someone else might be convinced.  
“Is it because of me?”  
“What? No.” he sounds appalled at the idea, but she can’t shake the feeling that it is, that it’s because she’s here training. “Neither of us are used to there being other people here. We’re not used to doing anything but being around each other.” he explains.  
She nods, “So it is, in a way.”  
“But not because he doesn’t want you here.” Luke adds quickly, “it’s just an adjustment for him.  
She nods, “Perhaps you should spend less time with me?” she suggests. “It’s not as though you’ve been with him a lot recently. “She tries to be delicate, but they both know that she’s talking about the fact that Luke has been in the small cottage even less than she has; when they finish in the afternoon, he’ll often stay out, meditating by himself.  
He nods. “Do you mind the break in your training?”  
She laughs and stands up, stretching to one side, then to the other, subtly trying to prove to him that she’s healed. “A couple of days sleeping in sounds nice.” Odd, she thinks to herself, but welcome.

A couple of days pass, and there’s no let-up in her training though. They still get up too early, and Luke still seems to spend less and less time in his home.  
They’re back and waiting for dinner to finish cooking; she’s just washing up while Luke fiddles with a part of his hand in the main room.  
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but aren’t you just avoiding the subject?” Wedge’s voice is a little strained, like he’s lifting something heavy, and Rey is about to go and help when she feels a burst of irritation and frustration from Luke, and stays her hand on the door.  
“What are exactly are you expecting me to do?” Luke asks fairly plaintively.  
“Talk to her.” There’s a bang after Wedge speaks, followed by swearing, and she rushes in at that point, more worried that curious.  
This isn’t the first time that she’s heard Wedge admonishing Luke to talk to someone; she assumes Leia, since it’s always a ‘her’ that he’s referring to, but Luke always seems to shy away from the subject.  
“Are you alright?” she asks, taking in the scene in front of her. The sofa, beaten up as it is, is floating half a foot above the ground, Wedge on his hands and knees, one arm stretched underneath it.  
“Yeah, just dropped a washer.” He clutches at something and stands up, Luke dropping the sofa back down.  
She wants to ask why Luke didn’t just use the Force to pull the washer out, but she’s found the Wedge likes doing things the old fashioned way, and there’s some awkward manoeuvring going on as they get the sofa back to where it should be. She wonders if she should say something, but that fleeting moment passes and Luke is back on the sofa, taking the washer from Wedge and slipping it back into the mechanism of his hand.  
She’s taking measures into her own hands though, she’s decided. “I was going to take some bread and stuff and spend the night in that little cave.” she says, already pulling some preserved food and a water bottle from their stores.  
Wedge frowns, “Are you sure?”  
Rey hums, carrying on what she’s doing. “I miss the sky over me, and Luke thinks I should have a break in my training before we move on.” She looks pointedly over her shoulder at Luke briefly. “Plus you haven’t had any privacy in so long.”  
She’s glad her back is turned, because knows that both of them are looking like teenagers who have been caught necking by their parents.  
“I’ll be fine, it’ll do us all some good, and when I get back, we can go back to physical training.” she turns round with a grin on her face, bag packed.

With her staff and her bag, she carefully makes her way across and down the island to a small cave Luke had showed her during one of their early morning hikes. It’s not much; barely enough for two people to take shelter in, but it’s enough to keep her away from Wedge and Luke for a day or so, and enough for her to meditate.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead! I've had this chapter written for months, and then I kept getting distracted and not posting. There is literally no excuse. Also this is a long one, with Force visions and stuff.

She meditates, listens to the sea and the birds above her and feels something close to peace. The Force is still strange to her; she can feel it, she knows without any doubt that it is real, but it’s still alien to think of it as the Force, it something that has always been a part of her life, and now that she notices it, it almost slips from her grasp.

Luke has told her not to try and push her mind out to her friends back at the rebel base, but here, away from him and Wedge, she tries, just to see if it really is as dangerous as he’s made it out to be.

Firmly settled against the edge of the cave, the mist coming off the sea making her face damp, she thinks of Finn. She thinks about his infectious smile and his enthusiasm for life, how even when he hated, even when he was scared, he gave everything to that emotion. She thinks of his voice and his hand, heavy in hers and what he sacrificed for her.

“Finn,” she focuses everything on him, and after a while she thinks she can feel the warmth she associates with him wrapping round her. She’s not sure if he’s awake, or if he’s still recovering from the fight with Ren, but she feels warm and she smiles.

Wake up! Something pulls her from her meditation, almost sending her toppling forwards, and she realises that it’s dark, that she’s soaking wet from the light rain and the sea spray, and that she’s lost all sensation in both her legs. She cries as she tries to stand, used to physical hardships, but also used to her body telling her when to stop before it reaches this point. Hand over hand she drags herself into the cave and lies there, willing the blood flow back into her extremities and groping around in her pack to find her heat source.

It takes time, but soon she’s carefully massaging the pins and needles from her thighs and calves, starting to steam as her clothing dries off.

“Alright,” she tells herself. “Maybe Luke was right on that.” She’ll not tell him that though.

She eats a little, and wraps herself in a blanket. It’s too dark to read, and she’s bone tired, as though she exerted herself too far in trying to stretch across the light years to Finn. She bundles herself up and turns the heat down to just enough to stop her freezing, and wills herself to sleep.

 

When she wakes in the morning, she’s stiff and a little chilled, and the morning fog is trying to get into the cave. Outside, the sun is rising, putting it a little later than when she’d rise with Luke.

The sea is calm though, and after she relieves herself and stretches out the night’s soreness, she ponders what to do with herself.

She’d said that she would meditate, but she’s eager to move around rather than sit still.

She moves, picks up her staff and lets the feel of it moving through the air guide her. One day, she’ll have to give it up for a lightsaber, but not yet, she doesn’t want to give up another piece of herself to this new life. It doesn’t do to dwell on the past, both Luke and Wedge remind her of that on a regular basis, and she knows, or at least she guesses, that both speak from long experience. Luke teaches that emotions, while not forbidden and dangerous, should be viewed with caution, experienced in moderation, understood before all else. He doesn’t teach the Jedi code as one without feeling or emotion, but one of restraint and mildness. He also admits that he doesn’t always practice what he preaches, and she can see that in the way he looks at Wedge some days. Wedge speaks of it in a different way, to be caught up in the past is to lose track of the present; it’s dangerous and has led too many of his friends to their deaths. Each one weighs heavy on his shoulders, the same kind of guilt she caught glimpses of from Poe. But even with all of that, she can’t let go entirely.

  
Rather than the polished moves that Luke has guided her through, she falls into the rhythm she knew on Jakku; sharp jabbing motions and heavy overhead swings. Moves designed to kill rather than to deflect. She’s never liked it but she’s killed before, to protect herself, her belongings, and very occasionally, other people.

  
She instinctively knows where the cliff edges are, she knows where the rocks that would trip her are, and like the night before, she falls into the Force without hesitation.

When she opens her eyes, it’s not the moss and rocks and mist of the island, it’s the sands and heat of Jakku that she sees. Her clothes are the same, her staff is the same, and off to one side, her beloved speeder lies in the sand, it’s power cells smoking slightly.

There are x-wings screaming overhead, bright bursts of lazer fire skimming off the sand and the interceptors. Balls of fire explode as each side gains and loses ground, and she knows, up there, Poe is calling the shots as he flies his own battle. It’s a losing battle, she can see that much; even slowed as they are in the atmosphere, the interceptors are too many, the resistance too few.

And landing up ahead, burning the sand to glass as it does so, is Kylo Ren’s shuttle, a black carrion bird descending in the last minutes of the fight. She screams and runs towards it, ready for a rematch armed even as she is with just her staff. When the ramp lowers though, it’s not Ren who is the first to exit, but Finn, dressed as a trooper, although she’d know him anywhere.

“They’ll take me back, I’ll submit to reconditioning, I was Phasma’s favourite student, they’ll take me back and I can work my way out again, do more damage.” He’s insisted, he’d been so sure, ignoring all the concerns that Poe and Rey and Leia levelled against his plan.

“I have the Force,” he assured them. “Reconditioning never took properly on me, it will be fine.”

None of them had been assured, but they had no choice, they had no other options.

And now he was there, in front of her, masked and armed as an enemy soldier. He raises his blaster, levels it at her and she screams at him, reaches out in the Force and finds a void.

When she looks back, she can’t remember exactly what happened. There was blaster fire, the terrifying hum and ozone burnt smell of a lightsabre and screaming. Somewhere in the carnage Finn’s helmet comes off, somewhere in the chaos her staff becomes a lightsabre, and when it’s all ended, it’s Kylo Ren on his knees between them, still masked.

“A traitor for a third time? I’m beginning to think you have a taste for it.” Ren says, as cocky as she remembers him.

Finn’s blaster is pointed at his head, and she’s poised in a guard position, but there’s a difference in the two of them; she’s ready to defend while Finn looks ready to shoot.

“We should kill him now, be done with it and end this properly.” Finn insists. It’s not Finn though, there’s still a void where he should be. It doesn’t sound like the Finn she knows (she thinks she knows) either, he wouldn’t do that, even to Ren, surely. They’d talked about this, they knew he was Leia’s son, they knew she still had faith in him.

“That’s not for us to decide.” She insists, reaching forwards to pull Ren’s mask off.

Something happens then, a split second motion and Finn’s blaster fires, hitting Ren point blank. There shouldn’t be a head left, let alone a face, but as the mask drops, and Finn drops with a rattle of trooper armour, she sees the fact that Ren’s mask was hiding. Not Ren’s, but Luke’s.

 

She comes to on the top of the cliff, muscles hurting, palms chafed against the leather grip and her staff cracked along its length where she’s struck it against a rock at some point.

She sucks in a deep breath, then another, and another, she can feel the Force pulling her back in but she resists it, pushes against it and focuses on the pain, on the physical feeling of her body. Luke had explained Force visions, that there was no way of knowing if they were visions of the future or not, that only the greatest Jedi had ever truly been sure of what they were seeing.

Another deep breath and she resolved herself that it was just her fears playing tricks on her. Her worries and her insecurities. Another breath and she leaned against an outcropping, looking over her staff. She might be able to repair it, if they’ve got any spare bits she can scrounge.

She sits there for a while and watches the birds, listens to the cries they make and tries not think about how much they sound like the shrieks of tie interceptors flying overhead. It’s getting on for mid morning and she’s not yet eaten so she returns to the cave and eats some more of the bread she’d brought with her.

The rest of the morning, she spends trying to work out if she can repair her staff. It looks as though it needs something to act as a brace around one end of it, otherwise another solid strike and it’s going to split entirely. Or, she needs to accept the loss and move on. It’s getting harder though, with every piece she loses of her old life, she clings more strongly to what she has left. That vision wasn’t just a horrific trick of all her fears, but a reminder of the things she has lost; her speeder, her plant, all her little trinkets she’d salvaged or bartered for over the years. Her helmet and the computer that she’d learnt so much from. And now all she has left are the remains of her clothes, packed away in a box wherever the resistance is currently operating from, and her staff. And soon, in all likelihood, she won’t have that anymore as anything other than a souvenir of her past life.

“Enough of this.” She chastises herself, and picks up the staff and her pack and heads down. The cliff stairway is still slick and treacherous, but she has a better grasp of the Force now to keep her steady as she descends. She and Luke have gone down to the little beaches this island has a few times, sometimes early in the mornings, other times later, to train in the water or the wet sand, or once, with Wedge, simply to enjoy a few rare hours of sunshine. Wedge had taken what he referred to as a “bracing dip” in the freezing water, while she and Luke, two children of the desserts had watched; Luke fond and amused while Rey was horrified. She wasn’t afraid of the water (it’s hard to be afraid of something you don’t understand the dangers of) but the sheer coldness of it, the way he yelped as he dove in and shivered when he came out was enough to put her off.

Now though, she’s tempted. The sand is cool and soft under her feet as she pulls her boots and socks off, rolls her trousers up and wades into the surf. She won’t go far, stretches out with the Force to feel the shelf where the beach gives way to the depths of the sea. Luke had explained it while Wedge was swimming, and the vastness of it offered some kind of comfort; like the desert of Jakku, this was something beyond comprehension. There’s so much life, she finds as she reaches out; birds and fish, and deeper down, vast creatures that go decades without ever seeing the sun as they live their lives in the depths. She only drifts a little, coming back to herself with a shock of freezing water hitting her front, soaking her through as the waves start to pick up. She shrieks and runs back to the dry of the beach, almost falling as the softly moving sand and the receding water try to drag her back, scrabbling to the beach and onto less damp rocks, out of breath and so very very awake.

She sheds off some of her outer layers and spreads them out to try and dry them; it won’t be perfect, but there’s no point in everything being soaked through, and then spends her time dashing in and out of the surf, laughing as she races the waves back and forth across the sand. A couple of lucky grabs land her a couple of small fish that came too close to her out of curiosity; she feels a little guilt at snuffing out their lives, but she’s decided on an extra night in the cave, and their flesh will add to the bread and dried fruit. She guts them roughly, having watched Wedge do it a few times, with the knife she’d been using on the bread, and wraps them in her scarf.

It’s nice, it’s calm, it’s everything that she knows she’s not going to have as soon as she goes back to the resistance, whenever that may be. Soon, she hopes, in case that dream does actually mean anything, and because she misses Finn and Poe, because she wants Luke to face his sister again. Eventually the sun, such as it is, starts to dip down and she starts to feel chilly, so she starts to make her way back up to the cave.

On her way back, she picks up a few bits of driftwood. Initially she thought about making a small fire, but she’s got the heat unit that she thinks she can cook over, so she thinks instead about making more little trinkets for Luke and Wedge’s shelves.

As it gets dark, the cave fills with the smell of slowly charring fish, and the wood and her damp clothes dry out in front of the heat unit.

The fish isn’t particularly tasty, but it means that she’s actually full, rather than the night before when she’d felt like she was back on Jakku, and once she’s finished eating, she wraps herself in her blanket and goes and sits at the mouth of the cave, watching the stars appear in the sky and trying to compare them to the constellations that she remembers from Jakku. When she’d been little, she had come up with all sorts of names and stories about them, then she’d found out their real names, the planets and the people who lived around them, and they seemed even more fantastic. She has to strain to think back that far, but she remembers the childish names, the stories of the epic travellers whose forms were drawn out in pinpoints, and who battled and searched forever across the blackness of space. Here, she can’t see Jakku’s star, but she thinks she knows which one gives Ryloth light, she can still see, a faint pin prick that is the Hosnian star, still bright even though it’s planets are nothing but dust. Jakku’s nights were often freezing cold as the sun dropped and the desert gave up its heat, but while this place is chilly, it never seems to get a lot colder at night.

“I wish you could see this,” she talks to herself, thinking about Finn and Poe as she does so, thinks about reaching out again, but after last night and the morning’s meditation gone wrong, she’s bone tired and the Force, as willing as it normally is to do as she wishes, seems a long way away. Instead, she goes further back into the cave and curls up near the heat, sleep coming quickly and easily.

 

The morning dawns with torrential rain driving into the entrance of the cave, a puddle forming and dampness soaking into everything. She huffs a sigh and goes back to sleep, sure that it will ease off as the sun rises. She doesn’t want another night here, and her dreams were unsettling, flashes of her Force visions interrupting them, mingling and changing throughout the night, confusing her. She wants to talk to Luke about them, because even, as he would no doubt say, they aren’t actual visions, there’s something unsettling about them, and it’s been too long since she heard from Leia or Poe for her to be happy that everything is alright. She’d thought that Chewie would be back after a month or so, even if she hadn’t called to be collected.

 

She wakes again and the rain has lessened. It’s still nasty outside, but there’s still novelty in rain for her. She packs up her things and heads out into the rain, taking care not to slip on the moss covered stones.

She hikes slowly, pondering her dreams and what she thinks they mean, touching the Force only very carefully as she crosses the island. The birds are all huddled up against the rain apart from the few that are braving the waves to catch the same small fish that she ate last night. It’s the lack of people that is very slowly starting to get to her. She needs this training to be complete, soon, she hopes.

As she approaches the cottage, she does reach out with the Force. She doesn’t want to walk into something she doesn’t want to see, but she also doesn’t want to interrupt if they’re finally talking. There’s a feeling of contentment blanketing the place, but Wedge is a beacon of worry, as always, while Luke is simply wrapped in the Force. She’s not sure what that means, but she approaches cautiously.

The shutters are open, but the curtains are closed, which means that Wedge has probably been up to make caf and then gone back to wandering round the house or curled up on the couch with a datapad, as is his usual habit when she and Luke are training. She heads for the door and knocks, feeling silly doing so, but not wanting to interrupt anything that she can’t quite get a proper sense of.

When she doesn’t get any kind of response, she does open the door, peering inside and finding the main living area dark and undisturbed.

“Luke?” She calls out as she pads inside, leaning her staff against the doorframe. It’s warm inside at least, the burner on low, and nothing smells of burnt meals. “Wedge?” They’re definitely both still here, but just apparently not talking to her. Asleep, maybe, or otherwise occupied.

She shrugs. She’d left to give them space and time alone, so she quietly heads for her own room, looking forwards to a dry set of clothes and making something hot to drink.

An hour or so later of quietly drying off and changing, and she’s sat on the ratty old couch with a mug of hot chocolate and a datapad loaded up with some Rebellion era holo dramas. She’s watching them with the sound off and subtitles on, because the blonde lead actress has a voice that makes her want to plug her ears up, and the child actor’s voice is just on the verge of breaking and it seems like the producers couldn’t work out how to disguise it. There’d been some noises from Luke and Wedge’s room, but nothing that had her worried, or that had her reaching for earphones, so she’s quite happy as she is, and it takes a couple of minutes to realise that someone is moving around behind her in the kitchen.

She turns around, and again, sees far more of Wedge than she’s ever wanted. He’s wearing underwear, which is a relief, but the only other thing he’s wearing is an offensively brightly coloured jumper, and they stop and stare at each other for a moment.

“Rey, sith, we didn’t hear you come back.” Wedge sputters out, pulling the jumper down and not making eye contact. “How long have you been back?”

She pointedly looks at the curtained window, “I did shout when I got back, an hour or so ago?”

Wedge looks relieved at that, like possibly if she’d arrived back earlier she would have seen or heard something she really wouldn’t want to. “Right, right. How was your little retreat?” He pours some caf into the mug he’s holding and holds it close to his chest.

“Good,” she pauses the holodrama she’s watching, “I could do with talking to Luke though. Not this instant, but in a bit. I think.”

Wedge nods. “I’ll let him know.” He sounds sad, and it’s a reminder that she’s interfering in their nice, quiet retirement all over again. “I’m going to…” he points to the door.

“Yeah, sure.” She smiles, and goes back to her datapad. She’s going to have to do something for him, when she finally leaves, that’s what you do to people who put up with you for months on end, she’s fairly sure.

The holodrama ends with some ridiculous shoot out between the Imperials and the Rebels, the child actor dying dramatically and the blonde vanishing halfway through the plot, off into the Outer Rim with some dashing Imperial officer. It wasn’t really the kind of thing she would have chosen to watch, but Poe had highlighted it as a favourite, she suspected because of all the space combat scenes.

 

Luke wanders out an hour or so later, clothed but his hair sticking up all over the place. He gravitates towards the tap and drinks a mug of water before he turns to Rey.

“How was your time in the cave?” He asks, sitting on the other end of the couch.

Rey sets her datapad down in her lap, “Cold, damp.” She says, not really sure how to broach the subject of what she saw.

“I felt you try to reach out to Finn.” Luke tells her after a while of silence. “You do remember what I told you about doing that?” He admonishes.

“Yes,” she replies, “but better to have tried and know from my own experience. Besides, I stopped.”

“You were lucky.” He concedes.

“Something told me to wake up, so I did.” She puts the datapad on the table and leans forwards. “I thought it was you, at first, but then I decided it was just the Force itself.”

“The Force isn’t alive like that Rey, but there are things out there that can manipulate it at far greater distances than you or I.”

“Like Ren, or Snoke?” She asks.

“I don’t know entirely what either of them are capable of, but I wouldn’t put it past them.” He tells her, and she feels like he’s not entirely being honest with her, a common thread whenever Snoke or Ren come up in conversation.

“I dreamed,” she tells him, “only it was when I was running through some exercises.”

Luke looks at her, studying her intently. “How do you mean?”

“I started to run through some exercises with my staff the morning after I tried to reach Finn, only I must have slipped into a meditation because I started to dream, only when it stopped, I was still running the exercises and my staff was smashed where I’d hit it against the rocks too hard.” She draws her knees up against her chest and rests her chin on them. “It felt entirely real, more than a dream, I think, but when I stopped, there was nothing of it there.”

Luke’s gaze weighs on her, and she wants to back away from it, away from where she can feel him reaching out with the Force around her. “I know what you said about not being able to see the future through the Force, but what if this was one possibility?”

“Then it would be one of an infinite number, and you would have no way of knowing whether it were true or not.” He touches her hand lightly, “Rey, what did you see?”

She takes a breath, tries to remember exactly. “Finn had gone back to the First Order as a spy, he had the Force and he believed that he could resist their reconditioning, we were all against it but we were running out of options, and Leia let him go. We were on Jakku, there was a massive aerial battle going on overhead, and then Kylo Ren’s shuttle landed. He and Finn came out, together, but it wasn’t him, there wasn’t anything left of him. I think I fought Ren, I had a lightsaber, and then he was on his knees. Finn was going to shoot him but I wanted to take him back; the First Order had lost, somehow, but Finn shot him anyway.” She stops and thinks about the last thing she saw. “When Ren fell to the floor, Finn dropped at the same time, and Ren’s mask came off, but it wasn’t his face.” She looks up at Luke. “It was yours.”

Luke doesn’t look as shocked about this as she had expected him to be, but Wedge, who had wandered out while she was telling her story and perched on the arm of the couch behind Luke looks like he’s seen a ghost.

“Isn’t that a lot like what you told me you saw at Dagobah?” he asks, resting a hand on Luke’s shoulder.

Luke sighs. “Not really. There are some similarities, but that was, for me, about seeing the darkness in myself. The Force trying to show me that Darth Vader and I were one and the same in many respects.” He looks down at his hand, the prosthetic one touching Rey’s, and then up at her face. “You know that I trained Ren, that he is my nephew?” He asks, and she nods. “There’s a lot of me in him, in a lot of ways. He’s the only survivor of the academy I raised and taught at, he was the last student I taught. When he dies, a large part of the old Jedi ways, which I suppose I represent, will die with him.” He doesn’t sound entirely sure of what he’s saying, and when Rey looks up at Wedge, he’s looking at the back of Luke’s head with a frown.

She thinks, and then carefully tries to explain herself. “I don’t think the meaning behind what I saw really matters. You said it yourself, the future is always in motion, and you’ve also said that the Force isn’t a thinking thing. What it means or what it’s trying to tell me, unless it can tell me directly, I’m not sure I care. What I am worried about is Finn trying to go back to the First Order to help and then dying or being reconditioned, whatever that means.” She pulls her hand away from Luke’s grasp. “I think, what I took from that, is that the Force is tired of us sitting here doing nothing. We have to go back. And I need a new weapon.”

She looks at the two of them, trying to be stern in the way she looks, the way she speaks. She’s been frustrated for so long, learning, but not enough, never able to convince Luke that they need to leave the shelter and peace of this planet, wondering why it is that he won’t talk to his sister, even if he did, in his eyes, fail Ben.  
Luke looks back at Wedge and nods his head.

“I’ve probably got some bits and pieces, if you let me have a look at your staff, we might be able to fix it.” Wedge tells her. “Just until you get something new, since you’ve not got a blaster or anything.” He adds on, when she looks disappointed.

“We start back tomorrow morning.” Luke tells her. “I have some things to do before then, but make sure you get an early night.” He gets up and pats her on the knee briefly, then as he turns, cups his hand round Wedge’s face. Wedge nods, whatever unspoken thing, something they both understand, and Rey feels very out of place for a moment.  
Luke goes back to their bedroom, and Rey looks at Wedge who just shrugs.

“Come on, might as well get this done now, and you look like you need something to do.” Wedge stands up and heads for the front door.

“Don’t you want some shoes?” she calls after him, uncurling from the couch.

He looks down at his feet and laughs. “Probably.” There’s a pair of old, worn boots by the door and he reaches for those, pulling them on with a grunt. When he opens the door, it’s still raining, and Rey is not enamoured of the idea of going outside again, but she follows, grabbing her own boots and her staff as she goes.

Wedge leads her to what she had always assumed was the wood and food store, somewhere she’d never actually needed to go into, since Wedge did most of the non-cookery related chores in the house. When he opens the door and powers on the lights, she sees that while there is a small wood pile, in out of the damp, and what looks like a small refrigeration unit, most of it is a workshop.

“What…?” she starts, looking into boxes and picking up parts as she walks a circuit of the small room.

Wedge shrugs and takes what she thinks is a model of the Falcon’s engine out of her hands. “You might not have noticed, but I’m not good at being idle. And this way, when bits and pieces around the house break, one of us can fix them, rather than having to call for help.”

The thing in the corner is definitely a holonet terminal, and a fairly new model, and there’s what looks like a pile of power cells for some kind of ship in another corner. As far as she knows there isn’t a ship on the island, although Wedge has never given her a clear answer on how he got here and how he plans to leave, if he ever chooses to. She eyes them suspiciously, and casts a sideways glance at Wedge.

“Let’s have a look at the staff,” he holds out his hand. “It wasn’t powered or anything, was it?”

“No,” she hands it over. “It just needs reinforcing. Some scrap metal and a welding torch and I can fix it.”

“I can see you’ve done it before.” He says, looking over the length of it. “Never considered putting a stun pack in here?”

“Couldn’t find one.” She says, taking the staff back and inspecting the cracks. “If I couldn’t salvage it from one of the wrecks, or maybe barter for it, I couldn’t have it, and stun generators were too expensive for me.” She looks down at the weapon. “Plus stunning just let people know that you were merciful. You couldn’t be merciful on Jakku. They’d come back and, well.” She leaves it at that.

Wedge looks horrified, and she gets the lightest flash of oh Luke from his mind, broadcast and full of pity. If Luke notices, then she doesn’t sense any kind of response, but he’s not so close by, and she doesn’t really want to push the matter.

“Welding kit is over there,” Wedge point to one end of the room, “if you want to get yourself familiar, I’ll see if I’ve got anything that you can use.”

It’s a nice rig, not brand new or top of the line, but full of safety features that she never had on Jakku, and capable of much finer control than she had back there. The safety glasses and face protection are old and obviously well used, they smell of the odd metal scent that she associates not just with Wedge, but with Poe, and to an extent Luke. Something about pilots, she guesses. Wedge comes back from the other side of the room after a while with a small stack of metal off cuts, and they sort through them in near silence. Rey discards some as too thick, or too brittle, a couple she leaves to one side as possibilities, or as something for another project that is slowly forming in her mind. The rest she takes, and Wedge leaves her to get on with her repairs, sitting on the workbench nearby, one leg folded under himself, working on his own project.

It’s nice, calming, centering, to be working on something with her hands like this. One of the things that the dream reminded her of was her speeder, and she misses the hours she poured into it, making it thoroughly her own. She’ll build a new one, when she has the time.

“Did Luke build his lightsaber?” she asks after a while, when she’s pulled the glasses up off her face and she’s wiping the sweat out of her eyes.

“Both of them.” Wedge replies. “Well, two of the three he had. The first was his father’s, that’s the one you returned to him. After he lost his hand, and that lightsaber, he built his first one, that saw us through the end of the civil war, the reestablishment of the Republic, and then when the academy fell, he lost that one. Somewhere along the line he built the third one, although I’ve never seen him use it, I assume he did at some point between then and now.”

“So you didn’t see him do it?” She sits down on the bench, looks at the staff to see how the repairs are looking; one more piece and it will be done.

Wedge shakes his head. “No, it’s a private, personal thing from what I understand. One of my other pilots, Corran, he was one of Luke’s very early students, he built his with half complete instructions and blind luck. Nearly killed him a few times.” He laughs. “Why?”

She shrugs. “I was curious. Maz said the one I gave back to Luke was mine, but I think she said similar to Finn, and now Luke has it back and it really is his to keep, so I’m going to need one.”

She picks up the next piece of metal, scouring it with cleanser before she sets it up to shape it. “And in the dream, or whatever it was, I didn’t have a sword, I had a staff with two ends.”

**Author's Note:**

> So there we go... 
> 
> I'm [anonymousblueberry.tumblr.com](http://anonymousblueberry.tumblr.com/) so come and say hi and drown in the X-wing pilot feels (warning... there are also many Kylo/Hux feels, because I am that sort of trash)


End file.
